The publication of The Coin by Yasmin Zaher marks the arrival of a determinedly contemporary, sometimes confounding, always compelling voice in English-language literature. Telling the story of a young Palestinian woman, struggling to make her life in New York City, we quickly get to know a woman of complexities and contradictions… She’s the heir to a vast fortune—and with the tastes that match such wealth—but is denied access to her inheritance, and is living on a meagre-ish stipend in one of the world’s most expensive cities. She’s a teacher in a middle school — a job she kind of respects, kind of ridicules, kind of loves, and kind of despises. She’s a woman obsessed with purity and personal hygiene, but who also fully embraces the often impure, sometimes unhygienic, undertaking of casual sex. And she’s a Palestinian whose memories and knowledge of her homeland are ever-receding in the rear view mirror, but who is finding the American soil increasingly resistant to the putting down of roots. With all these tensions, something in her life is going to have to give. And what a ride we’re in for when it does.

Buy The Coin: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/the-coin

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Yasmin Zaher is a Palestinian journalist and writer born in 1991 in Jerusalem. The Coin is her first novel.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-england

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w

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In a world overwhelmed by complex political challenges and endless commentary, where can we turn for insight into how we got here—and where we might go next? From the survival of democracy to the rise of AI, from confronting inequality to resisting surveillance, today's problems demand deep thinking.

In his latest book The History of Ideas, David Runciman explores how the rich history of political thought offers fresh perspectives on contemporary issues. What can the creator of the Panopticon teach us about resisting surveillance? How do the ideas of a former slave and a French Existentialist redefine liberation? And could a utopian novel from 1872 illuminate our understanding of artificial intelligence?

David Runciman joined Adam Biles for a spirited journey through radical thinkers and ideas of the past 250 years. Discover how their questions and insights remain strikingly relevant today, and why embracing diverse perspectives is key to understanding our world—and ourselves.

Buy The History of Ideas: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/confronting-leviathan-ii

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David Runciman is Professor of Politics at the University of Cambridge and the former Head of the Department of Politics and International Studies.His previous books for Profile include The Handover, Confronting Leviathan, Where Power Stops and How Democracy Ends. He writes regularly about politics for the London Review of Books, created the widely acclaimed weekly podcast Talking Politics and is host of the new podcast Past Present Future.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-england

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w

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Rachel Kushner’s fourth novel Creation Lake is a spy novel stacked with ideas. As our fast-thinking, gun-packing protagonist wends her way down to the south of France, charged—by forces unknown—with infiltrating and sowing chaos at a commune of eco-warriors, her mission leads her into exhilarating reflections on activism, on charisma, on neanderthals and other lost races of archaic humans, on the remodelling—some might say devastation—of rural France in the name of progress, on loss in its myriad forms, on the shadows loss leaves behind, on Guy Debord, on the apparently charmed life of Louis Ferdinand Céline, on Daft Punk’s ubiquitous Get Lucky, on space, on time, on spacetime, and on the many paths she has and hasn’t taken in her life… As that list hopefully demonstrates, the scope of Creation Lake is vast, stretching from the micro of the personal to the macro of the cosmos—and touching on everything in between. And yet incredibly, Creation Lake never feels weighed down by all this. Quite the opposite. It hurls forward at exactly the dizzying speed you’d expect from the wise-cracking secret agent at its heart. All in all, Creation Lake is quite the ride. Recorded in Paris in March 2024.

Buy Creation Lake: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/creation-lake-3

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Rachel Kushner is the author of the internationally acclaimed novels THE MARS ROOM, THE FLAMETHROWERS, and TELEX FROM CUBA, as well as a book of short stories, THE STRANGE CASE OF RACHEL K. Her new book, THE HARD CROWD: ESSAYS 2000-2020 will be published in April 2021. She has won the Prix Médicis and been a finalist for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Folio Prize, the James Tait Black Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was twice a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. She is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her books have been translated into twenty-six languages. 

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-england

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w

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This week’s guest is Meg Mason, author of the literary sensation Sorrow and Bliss.

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'It is impossible to read this novel and not be moved. It is also impossible not to laugh out loud... Extraordinary'

Guardian

Everyone tells Martha Friel she is clever and beautiful, a brilliant writer who has been loved every day of her adult life by one man, her husband Patrick. A gift, her mother once said, not everybody gets.

So why is everything broken? Why is Martha - on the edge of 40 - friendless, practically jobless and so often sad? And why did Patrick decide to leave?

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All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Meg Mason began her career at the Financial Times and The Times of London. Her work has since appeared in The Sunday Times UK, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Sunday Telegraph. She has written humour for Sunday STYLE magazine and The New Yorker's Daily Shouts and been a regular columnist for GQ and contributor to ELLE, marie claire and Vogue. Her first novel You Be Mother was published in 2017. It was followed by Sorrow and Bliss, first released in Australia in 2020, then published in the US in February 2021 and out in the UK in June 2021. The studio, New Regency, is adapting Sorrow and Bliss for screen. Visit megmason.com for more.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

Shak

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This week’s guest is guest is Jem Calder, author of Reward System a series of interlinked stories that charts a group of friends in their mid-twenties as they struggle to make something of their lives in an indifferent, often hostile, 21st century metropolis.

Sally Rooney said that “Reward System is an exhilarating and beautiful book by an extraordinarily gifted writer. Reading these stories, I found myself thinking newly and differently about contemporary life” while Holly Pester called it “'A crushing and clear-sighted portrayal of people dodging the alienation of work, money and life's digital shorelines” adding that the short scenes were “so brilliantly observed I felt the reality of a generation in every detail.”

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If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes and early access to Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses.

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All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Jem Calder was born in Cambridge, and lives and works in London. His fiction has been published in The Stinging Fly and Granta. Reward System is his first book

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

Shak

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DBC Pierre’s Big Snake Little Snake is a characteristically freewheeling, riotous account of a couple of years the author lived in the Caribbean, spending his time, among other endeavours, conducting an inquiry into risk. It’s also an extraordinarily fun book, yet with a deep seriousness at its core. Seeking to understand, as it does, how the world can be presented to us as fundamentally indifferent, while also being so clearly, and so often, unfair.

Buy Big Snake, Little Snake here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781788169776/big-snake-little-snake-an-inquiry-into-risk

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If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes and early access to Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses.

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All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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One of the nation's most uncompromising literary voices, DBC Pierre is author of the novels VERNON GOD LITTLE, LUDMILA'S BROKEN ENGLISH and LIGHTS OUT IN WONDERLAND, plus the picture book for distracted adults PETIT MAL and the Hammer novella BREAKFAST WITH THE BORGIAS. The novel VERNON GOD LITTLE sold in 43 territories and won the Man Booker Prize, the Whitbread Prize for Best First Novel, the Bollinger Wodehouse Everyman Award and the James Joyce Award from University College Dublin. His ground-breaking new novel MEANWHILE IN DOPAMINE CITY was published by Faber & Faber in August2020 and is short-listed for The Goldsmiths Prize.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

Shak

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Despite being a lauded writer and critic, despite being the winner of a Pulitzer Prize even, Margo Jefferson innovates and takes risks like a writer with nothing to lose. Her new book, Constructing a Nervous System is both the history of a mind’s formation and the deconstruction of a culture and its tropes, as well as what feels like a form of self-analysis taking place on the page, beneath the readers eyes, in real time. It’s a book about race and gender, but also of family and culture, where all four intersect, and how one person used the limitations society sought to place on her as a ladder to climb free of them. 

Buy Constructing a Nervous System here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781783789009/constructing-a-nervous-system-a-memoir

The winner of a Pulitzer Prize for criticism, Margo Jefferson was for years a theater and book critic for Newsweek and The New York Times. Her writing has appeared in, among other publications, Vogue, New York magazine, and The New Republic. She is the author of On Michael Jackson and is a professor of writing at Columbia University School of the Arts.

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If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes and early access to Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses.

Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en

All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

Shak

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On 29 November 2019, Usman Kahn attacked and killed Saskia Jones and Jack Merritt at Fishmongers Hall in London, and was later shot dead by police on London Bridge. Jones and Merritt were involved in a prison education programme in which Kahn had participated. All three had gathered at an event that day to mark five years of the programme. Preti Taneja also worked on that programme as a teacher of creative writing in prisons. Jack Merritt oversaw her work. Kahn was one of her students. Aftermath, is Taneja’s attempt to come to an understanding of these events both how they called into question what had come before and the grief and trauma they engendered.

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If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes and early access to Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses.

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All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Preti Taneja is a writer and activist. Her first novel, We That Are Young, won the Desmond Elliott Prize and was listed for awards including the Folio Prize and the Prix Jan Michalski. It has been translated into several languages. Her second book is Aftermath, a lament on the language of prison, terror, trauma and grief. Taneja is Professor of World Literature and Creative Writing at Newcastle University. She is a contributing editor at And Other Stories, and at The White Review.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

Shak

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Superstar Poets and (Step)Fatherhood in Chile, with Alejandro Zambra

What is a Chilean Poet? According to Pru, one of the characters in Alejandro Zambra’s latest novel, ‘Being a Chilean poet is like being a Peruvian chef or a Brazilian soccer player or a Venezuelan model.’ That’s to say they are famous, respected and wealthy…or at least, some of them are. But what makes a Chilean poet? That’s a little harder to pin down, and in a way it’s this question that bugs not only the writer of this extraordinary and charming novel, but also several of its characters—Gonzalo and his step-son Vicente chief among them. Chilean Poet is a tender and moving depiction of a country, an art-form, and a family. It’s deeply insightful on the subjects of parenthood, class and failure, and it’s also got some of the most brilliantly written, and staggeringly awkward, examples of lovemaking—both adolescent and middle-aged—we’ve ever had the squiriming pleasure to read.

Buy Chilean Poet here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781783782888/chilean-poet

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If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes and early access to Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses.

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All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Alejandro Zambra was born in Santiago, Chile in 1975. He is the author of two books of poems, Bahía Inútil and Mudanza; a collection of essays, No leer; and three novels, Bonsái, which was awarded a Chilean Critics Award for best novel, The Private Lives of Trees, and Ways of Going Home, which was awarded the Altazor Prize, selected by The National Book Council as the best Chilean novel published during 2012, and won an English Pen Award. He was selected as one of Granta‘s Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists and was elected to the Bogotá39 list.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

Shak

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In this special double episode we welcome dear friends of the bookshop Rachel Cusk and Siemon Scamell-Katz. First up is a conversation between Rachel Cusk and Adam Biles about her extraordinary recent novel Second Place, recorded in March in front of a small in store audience. Then, the podcast decamps 28 rue Saint Gille, where Siemon Scamell-Katz’s transcendent exhibition La fin de l’alterité (The End of Otherness), runs until April the 16th. There, Adam talks with Siemon about his exhibition, and both Rachel and Siemon about Quarry, their newly published collaboration for Sylph Editions Cahier Series.

Find out more about Siemon Scamell-Katz’s La fin de l’alterité here: https://siemonscamell-katz.com

Follow Siemon Scamell-Katz on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/siemon_scamell.katz/?hl=en

Buy Second Place here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9780571366699/second-place-longlisted-for-the-booker-prize-2021

Rachel Cusk is the author of the Outline Trilogy, the memoirs A Life’s Work and Aftermath, and several other works of fiction and non-fiction. She is a Guggenheim fellow. She lives in Paris.

Siemon Scamell-Katz is a contemporary painter living and working between Norfolk and Paris. His practice is based on an understanding of the way humans see, an understanding he uses to create abstract paintings in oil and enamel on aluminium.

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If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes and early access to Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses.

Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en

All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

Shak

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In this special episode, we’re joined by Parisian jazz musician Alex Freiman, to discuss the process of composing the theme music for Friends of Shakespeare and Company Read Ulysses

Hear more from Alex Freiman here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

Follow Alex Freiman on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/alex.guitarfreiman/

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SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR EARLY EPISODES AND BONUS FEATURES

All episodes of our Ulysses podcast are free and available to everyone. However, if you want to be the first to hear the recordings, by subscribing, you can now get early access to recordings of complete sections.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/channel/shakespeare-and-company/id6442697026

Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco

In addition a subscription gets you access to regular bonus episodes of our author interview podcast. All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit.

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Discover more about Shakespeare and Company here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com

Buy the Penguin Classics official partner edition of Ulysses here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/d/9780241552636/ulysses

Find out more about Hay Festival here: https://www.hayfestival.com/home

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Find out more about him here: https://www.adambiles.net

Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Dr. Lex Paulson is Executive Director of the School of Collective Intelligence at Université Mohammed VI Polytechnique in Morocco.

Original music & sound design by Alex Freiman.

Hear more from Alex Freiman here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

Follow Alex Freiman on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/alex.guitarfreiman/

Featuring Flora Hibberd on vocals.

Hear more of Flora Hibberd here: https://open.spotify.com/artist/5EFG7rqfVfdyaXiRZbRkpS

Visit Flora Hibberd's website: This is my website:florahibberd.com and Instagram https://www.instagram.com/florahibberd/ 

Music production by Adrien Chicot.

Hear more from Adrien Chicot here: https://bbact.lnk.to/utco90/

Follow Adrien Chicot on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/adrienchicot/

Photo of Alex Freiman by Laurent Delhourme

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To mark the paperback release of George Saunders’s extraordinary reading and writing guide A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, we are delighted to release this conversation from last year—previously only available to Friends of Shakespeare and Company.

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All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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From the Man Booker Prize-winning, New York Times-bestselling author of Lincoln in the Bardo, a literary masterclass on how to become both a better writer and reader, on what makes great stories work, and what they can tell us about how to live. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders guides the reader through seven classic Russian short stories he's been teaching for twenty years as a professor in the prestigious Syracuse University graduate MFA creative writing program. Paired with stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, these essays are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it's more relevant than ever in these turbulent times. Saunders approaches each of these stories technically yet accessibly, and through them explains how narrative functions; why we stay immersed in a story and why we resist it; and the bedrock virtues a writer must foster. For the process of writing, Saunders reminds us, is as much a craft as it is a quality of openness and a willingness to see the world through new eyes. Funny, frank, and rigorous, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain ultimately shows how great fiction can change a person's life and become a benchmark of one's moral and ethical beliefs.

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George Saunders is the author of nine books, including Lincoln in the Bardo, winner of the 2017 Man Booker Prize and the Premio Rezzori prize. Tenth of December was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the inaugural Folio Prize. He has received MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships and the PEN/Malamud Prize for excellence in the short story, and was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2013, he was named one of the world's 100 most influential people by Time magazine. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

Shak

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One way Philippe Sands has described his extraordinary new book The Ratline is as “a sort of Nazi love story”. While there is certainly a love-story between two Nazis at its heart—specifically the marriage of Otto and Charlotte Wachter—The Ratline is so much more than that. It’s an investigation into the escape routes used by high-ranking German officials after the end of the Second World War, that reads at times, like a spy-thriller. It’s a study of memory, responsibility and guilt. It’s an examination of the self-deception that filial duty can engender. And it’s an exploration of the geopolitical, ideological and historical fault-lines that are still making themselves felt, and horrendously so, today.

Buy The Ratline here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781474608145/the-ratline-love-lies-and-justice-on-the-trail-of-a-nazi-fugitive

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Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en

All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Philippe Sands is an international lawyer and, since 2018, the president of English PEN. He is a frequent commentator on CNN and the BBC World Service. In 2003 he was appointed a Queen’s Counsel. He lives in London.

Follow Philippe on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/philippesands

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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Our guest in the writer’s studio this week is Ferdia Lennon, whose debut novel Glorious Exploits depicts the ancient world in a way readers will never have experienced it before. Set in Syracuse in 412 BC, after the catastrophic attempt by Athens to invade the city, Lampo and Gelon, two out-of-work potters, have the harebrained idea of staging a production of Medea—perhaps the greatest play, by unquestionably the greatest playwright of their time—using, as actors, the Athenian soldiers held as prisoners in the quarry. And if that premise weren’t intriguing enough on it’s own, it’s the writer’s execution that really sets Glorious Exploits apart, as Lennon eschews the stilted formality that tales of Antiquity often lapse into, in favour of an always lively, frequently fruity, distinctly Irish vernacular. Glorious Exploits is a story about friendship, about art, about love, and about violence. It’s also a story about stories—those we tell each other, those we tell ourselves, and the power they have to spirit us to other worlds entirely. 

Buy Glorious Exploits: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/glorious-exploits

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Ferdia Lennon was born in Dublin to an Irish mother and Libyan father. He holds a BA in History and Classics from University College Dublin and an MA in Prose Fiction from the University of East Anglia. His short stories have appeared in publications such as the Irish Times and the Stinging Fly. In 2019 and 2021, he received a Literature Bursary Award from the Arts Council of Ireland. After spending many years in Paris, he now lives in Norwich with his wife and son.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-england

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w

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As its title suggests, Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century is a book about the many and varied crises our world is facing. However by tracing the roots of these crises back over decades rather than years, and by focussing less on the political or economic shocks themselves, and more on the systemic and cross-continental fault lines that allowed for and amplified these shocks, Disorder, acts as a welcome antidote the short-termism and parochial thinking that has come to define a lot of political analysis.

And while Disorder may not make the crises we face any less frightening, it certainly makes them far less confusing, and that is a source of a certain relief in itself.

Buy Disorder here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9780198864981/disorder-hard-times-in-the-21st-century

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Looking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulysses

If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes and early access to Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses.

Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco

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All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Helen Thompson is Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge University. She is the author of Oil and the western economic crisis (2017); China and the mortgaging of America (2010); and Might, right, prosperity and consent: representative democracy and the international economy (2008). Since 2015, Helen has been a regular contributor to the podcast Talking Politics and has written articles for the London Review of Books, The New York Times, and The Financial Times.

Follow Helen on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/HelenHet20

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel Feeding Time here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

Shak

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We speak with novelist Rob Doyle about his new book Autobibliography in which he recounts a year spent rereading 52 books. Detailing the memories the books unearthed and the impact they had on him Autobibliography is a fascinating insight into the apprenticeship of one of our most exciting young novelists and a full-throated, although not unambiguous celebration of the power of literature.

Buy Autobibliography here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781800750524/autobibliography

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SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS FEATURES

Looking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulysses

If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes including:

• Early access to complete chapters of Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses
• An initiation into the world of rare book collecting;
• The chance to expand your reading horizons as our passionate booksellers recommend their favourite titles;
• Handpicked classic interviews from our archive;
• And an insight into what makes your favourite writers tick as they answer searching questions from our Café’s Proust questionnaire.

Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en

All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Rob Doyle was born in Dublin. His first novel, Here Are the Young Men, was published in 2014. It was chosen as a book of the year by the Sunday Times, Irish Times and Independent, and was among Hot Press magazine's '20 Greatest Irish Novels 1916-2016'. Doyle has adapted it for a film with director Eoin Macken. Doyle's collection of short stories, This is the Ritual, was published by Bloomsbury in 2016. Doyle is the editor of the The Other Irish Tradition (Dalkey Archive Press), and In This Skull Hotel Where I Never Sleep (Broken Dimanche Press). His writing has appeared in the Guardian, Vice, TLS, Dublin Review, and many other publications, and he writes a weekly books column for the Irish Times. He teaches on the Creative Writing MFA at the University of Limerick, and lives the rest of the year in Berlin.

Follow Rob on Twitter here: @RobDoyle1

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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In The Sinner and the Saint, Kevin Birmingham deftly unpicks the personal, societal, historical and philosophical forces that led Fyodor Dostoyeksky—isolated, indebted, beset by epileptic seizures—to take up his pen in the summer of 1865 and begin writing Crime and Punishment, and shows how it’s impossible to understand the invention of Rasklonikov without also getting to grips with the mind of a French murderer-poet who charmed and outraged Parisian society, in almost equal measure, three decades earlier—the notorious Pierre François Lacenaire.

Buy The Sinner and the Saint here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9780241235942/the-sinner-and-the-saint-dostoevsky-a-crime-and-its-punishment

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SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS FEATURES

Looking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulysses

If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes including:

• Early access to complete chapters of Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses
• An initiation into the world of rare book collecting;
• The chance to expand your reading horizons as our passionate booksellers recommend their favourite titles;
• Handpicked classic interviews from our archive;
• And an insight into what makes your favourite writers tick as they answer searching questions from our Café’s Proust questionnaire.

Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en

All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Kevin Birmingham is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Most Dangerous Book, which won the PEN New England Award and the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. He has been named a Public Scholar by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and he received his Ph.D. in English from Harvard. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times Book Review, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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This week we’re joined by the legendary guitarist, composer, record producer, writer, and founding member of Patti Smith and Her Band, Lenny Kaye to discuss his epic and illuminating new book Lightning Striking: Ten Transformative Moments in Rock & Roll

Buy Lighting Striking here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781474615075/lightning-striking

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SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS FEATURES

Looking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulysses

If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes including:

• Early access to complete chapters of Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses
• An initiation into the world of rare book collecting;
• The chance to expand your reading horizons as our passionate booksellers recommend their favourite titles;
• Handpicked classic interviews from our archive;
• And an insight into what makes your favourite writers tick as they answer searching questions from our Café’s Proust questionnaire.

Subscribe on Spotify here: https://anchor.fm/sandco

Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en

All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

*

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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Back in November, Hollie McNish and Michael Pedersen dropped by the bookshop for a reading and a chat. The conversation touched on poetry, class, adapting the Greeks, artistic cross-pollination, the perks of being Scottish writer, and how midwives are the toughest crowd of all . . .

Buy Slug here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9780349726366/slug-the-sunday-times-bestseller

Buy Oyster here:

Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore

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SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS FEATURES

If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes including:

• An initiation into the world of rare book collecting;
• The chance to expand your reading horizons as our passionate booksellers recommend their favourite titles;
• Handpicked classic interviews from our archive;
• And an insight into what makes your favourite writers tick as they answer searching questions from our Café’s Proust questionnaire.

Subscribe on Spotify here: https://anchor.fm/sandco

Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en

All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Hollie McNish is a poet, writer and spoken word artist based between Cambridge and Glasgow. She has published four collections of poetry, and a poetic memoir on politics and new parenthood, Nobody Told Me (2016), which won the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry and has been translated into German, French and Spanish. McNish’s latest book is a cross-genre collection of poetry, memoir and short stories, Slug, and other things I've been told to hate, as is her forthcoming collection, Lobster. McNish, whose themes include breast-feeding, motherhood, immigration and women in sport, has a Master’s degree in Economics and no drama training. She gave her first live poetry reading at basement open mic night in Covent Garden, London, has since performed worldwide, and was crowned 2009’s UK Slam poetry champion. Among many activities, McNish runs Page to Performance, which delivers spoken word workshops and poetry slams to schools and other audiences.

Michael Pedersen is a prize-winning Scottish poet and author. His second collection, Oyster, was published in 2017 and was illustrated by and performed as a live show with Scott Hutchison (of Scottish band Frightened Rabbit). Pedersen has been named one of Canongate’s Future 40; was a finalist for the 2018 Writer of the Year at the Herald Scottish Culture Awards; was awarded the 2014 John Mather Trust Rising Star of Literature Award; and won a 2015 Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship. Pedersen also co-founded Neu! Reekie!, a prize-winning arts collective that has produced cutting-edge shows around the world for over ten years. 

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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For the Valentine’s week episode of our podcast, we were joined by Xiaolu Guo to discuss her intense, fragmentary meditation on the nature of love, A Lover’s Discourse.

Buy A Lover’s Discourse here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781529112481/a-lovers-discourse

Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore

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SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS FEATURES

If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes including:

• An initiation into the world of rare book collecting;
• The chance to expand your reading horizons as our passionate booksellers recommend their favourite titles;
• Handpicked classic interviews from our archive;
• And an insight into what makes your favourite writers tick as they answer searching questions from our Café’s Proust questionnaire.

Subscribe on Spotify here: https://anchor.fm/sandco

Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en

All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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A Chinese woman comes to post-Brexit London to start over - just as the Brexit campaign reaches a fever pitch.

Isolated and lonely in a Britain increasingly hostile to foreigners, she meets a landscape architect and the two begin to build their future together.

Playing with language and the cultural differences that our narrator encounters as she settles into her new life, the lovers must navigate their differences and their romance, whether on their unmoored houseboat or in a cramped apartment in east London. Suffused with a wonderful sense of humour, this intimate novel asks what it means to make a home and a family in a new land.

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Xiaolu Guo was born in south China. She studied at the Beijing Film Academy and published six books in China before moving to London in 2002. Her books include Village of Stone which was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth which was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize, and I Am China which was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. Her recent memoir, Once Upon a Time in the East, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award, the Jhalak Prize and the Rathbones Folio Award 2018, and was a Sunday Times Book of the Year.

In 2013 Xiaolu was named as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. She has directed several award-winning films including She, A Chinese, and documentaries about China and Britain. She was a judge for the Booker Prize in 2019, and is currently a visiting professor at Columbia University in New York.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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This week’s guest is Andrew Hankinson, author of the brilliant Don't applaud. Either laugh or don't. (At the Comedy Cellar.), a book about three things:

1. A room called the Comedy Cellar.

2. Who gets to speak in that room.

3. What they get to say.

Buy Don't applaud. Either laugh or don't. (At the Comedy Cellar.) here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781911617686/dont-applaud-either-laugh-or-dont-at-the-comedy-cellar

Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore

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SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS FEATURES

If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes including:

• An initiation into the world of rare book collecting;
• The chance to expand your reading horizons as our passionate booksellers recommend their favourite titles;
• Handpicked classic interviews from our archive;
• And an insight into what makes your favourite writers tick as they answer searching questions from our Café’s Proust questionnaire.

Subscribe on Spotify here: https://anchor.fm/sandco

Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en

All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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The Comedy Cellar is a tiny basement club in New York's Greenwich Village. Run according to the principles of its owners, the Dworman family, it became a safe place for stand-ups to take risks and experiment. Superstar comedians such as Amy Schumer, Dave Chappelle, Jon Stewart, and Louis CK became regulars, celebrities started to hang out, the club hosted debates, and everyone was encouraged to argue at its back table. Then the Comedy Cellar ended up on the frontline of the global culture war.

Andrew Hankinson speaks to the Cellar's owner, comedians, and audience members, using interviews, emails, podcasts, letters, text messages, and previously private documents to create a conversation about who gets to speak and what they get to say, and why. Moving backwards in time from Louis CK's downfall to when Manny Dworman used to host folk singers including Bob Dylan, this is about a comedy club, but it's also about the widening cultural chasm.

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Andrew Hankinson is a journalist who was born, raised, and lives in Newcastle upon Tyne, northern England. He started his career at Arena magazine and is now a freelance feature writer who has contributed to publications including GQ, The Observer, The Guardian, and Wired. His first book, You Could Do Something Amazing With Your Life [You Are Raoul Moat], won the CWA Non-Fiction Prize in 2016.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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2nd February - 16th June 2022

933 Pages, 110 readers, (roughly) 70 characters, 18 Sections, 5 months, 1 book. 100 years.

Friends of Shakespeare and Company read ULYSSES by James Joyce

To listen, subscribe now wherever you get your podcasts.

Friends of Shakespeare and Company read ULYSSES is conceived and produced at Shakespeare and Company in Paris by S&Co Literary Director Adam Biles in collaboration with Professor Lex Paulson, and in partnership with Penguin Classics and Hay Festival.

Find out more about Shakespeare and Company here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com

Buy the Penguin Classics official partner edition of Ulysses here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/d/9780241552636/ulysses

Find out more about Hay Festival here: https://www.hayfestival.com/home

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Our guest this week is Roxy Dunn, whose debut novel As Young As This is a meticulous examination of the lives and loves of young women today. Told, strikingly, in the second person, it is structured by the the succession of first boys, then men in the protagonist Margot’s life, and populated by dysfunctional friends and a wisecracking, but deeply caring family. As Young As This is as witty as it is sincere, as revealing as it is touching. Pandora Sykes said that “with glorious attention to detail and emotional fluency, Dunn charts the ways in which we are built and broken by love” while Daisy Buchanan called As Young As This 'Raw, funny and beautiful” adding that it’s a “really gorgeously observed novel about youth and womanhood”

Buy As Young As This: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/as-young-as-this

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Roxy Dunn is a Writer/Performer and graduate of the BBC Comedy Writersroom. She’s acted in multiple television sitcoms and her shows have received sell-out runs at the Edinburgh Fringe and SOHO Theatre. Her scripts have been optioned by several production companies and her pilot Useless Millennials was commissioned and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. As Young as This is her first novel.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-england

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w

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Our guest this week is the wonderful Rebecca Solnit discussing Orwell’s Roses, her fresh take on George Orwell as an avid gardener, whose political writing was grounded in his passion for the natural world.

Buy Orwell’s Roses here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781783788620/orwells-roses

Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore

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SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS FEATURES

If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes including:

• An initiation into the world of rare book collecting;
• The chance to expand your reading horizons as our passionate booksellers recommend their favourite titles;
• Handpicked classic interviews from our archive;
• And an insight into what makes your favourite writers tick as they answer searching questions from our Café’s Proust questionnaire.

Subscribe on Spotify here: https://anchor.fm/sandco

Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en

All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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From 1936 to 1940, the newly-wed George Orwell lived in a small cottage inHertfordshire, writing, and tending his garden. When Rebecca Solnit visited the cottage, she discovered the descendants of the roses that he had planted many decades previously. These survivors, as well as the diaries he kept of his planting and growing, provide a springboard for a fresh look at Orwell's motivations and drives -and the optimism that countered his dystopian vision - and open up a profound mediation on our relationship to plants, trees and the natural world.

Tracking Orwell's impact on political thought over the last century, Solnit journeys toEngland and Russia, Mexico and Colombia, exploring the political and historical events that shaped Orwell's life and her own. From a history of roses to discussions of climate change and insights into structural inequalities in contemporary society, Orwell's Roses is a fresh reading of a towering figure of 20th century literary and political life, which finds optimism, solace and solutions to our 21st century world.

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Rebecca Solnit is author of, among other books, Call Them By Their True Names, The Mother of All Questions, Men Explain Things to Me, Wanderlust, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, the NBCC award-winning River of Shadows and A Paradise Built in Hell. A contributing editor to Harper’s, she writes regularly for the London Review of Books and the Los Angeles Times. She lives in San Francisco.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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For our first podcast of 2022 we leave the bookshop and take to the buses of Paris for a conversation with Lauren Elkin, author of No. 91/92: notes on a Parisian commute.

Buy No. 91/92: notes on a Parisian commute here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781838014186/no-9192-notes-on-a-parisian-commute

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SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS FEATURES

If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes including:

• An initiation into the world of rare book collecting;
• The chance to expand your reading horizons as our passionate booksellers recommend their favourite titles;
• Handpicked classic interviews from our archive;
• And an insight into what makes your favourite writers tick as they answer searching questions from our Café’s Proust questionnaire.

Subscribe on Spotify here: https://anchor.fm/sandco

Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en

All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

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Commuting between English and French, Lauren Elkin chronicles a life in transit. From musings on Virginia Woolf and Georges Perec, to her first impressions in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, to the discovery of her ectopic pregnancy, her diary sketches a portrait of the author, not as an artist, but as a pregnant woman on a Parisian bus. In the troubling intimacy of public transport, Elkin queries the lines between togetherness and being apart, between the everyday and the eventful, registering the ordinary makings of a city and its people.

Lauren Elkin is a Franco-American writer and translator. Her last book, Flâneuse: Women Walk the City was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, a New York Times Notable Book of 2017, and a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. Her translation, with Charlotte Mandell, of Claude Arnaud's biography of Jean Cocteau, won the 2017 French-American Foundation's Translation Prize. Her next book, Art Monsters: on Beauty and Excess, is to be published by Chatto & Windus. She currently lives in London, with her partner and son.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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As a little treat this Christmas, we’re delighted to bring you an extract of Cerys Matthews reading A Child’s Christmas in Wales, by Dylan Thomas. Cerys read the same extract when she last visited us at the bookshop in December 2015. It was such a magical moment that, when we learned that Cerys had recorded this story for posterity, we asked if we could share some of it with you.

The full version is available on CD here: https://cerysmatthews.co.uk/product/dylan-thomas-a-childs-christmas-poems-and-tiger-eggs/

Or to stream on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/4r8YyMz1maFauVfo9RznXv?si=WSGzsLOJSUu5xzDjY-0Q1w

If you enjoy listening to our podcast and would like to spend even more of 2022 with us in Paris, you can now subscribe for exclusive regular bonus episodes.

On Spotify: https://anchor.fm/sandco/subscribe

On Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en

Or on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/sandco

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32H…kLNA&dl_branch=1

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This week Adam is joined by Sarah Hall, author of Burntcoat a novel of and for our times. Called “dark and brilliant” by Sarah Moss and “a masterpiece” by Daisy Johnson, much like the Japanese burnt timber technique evoked in the book, Burntcoat leaves readers scarred but fortified, more ready to face life’s elements.

Buy Burntcoat here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9780571329328/burntcoat

Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore

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You were the last one here before I closed the door of Burntcoat, before we all shut our doors.

In the bedroom above her immense studio at Burntcoat, the celebrated sculptor Edith Harkness is making her final preparations. Her life will draw to an end in the coming days.

Downstairs, the studio is a crucible glowing with memories and desire. It was here, when the first lockdown came, that she brought Halit. The lover she barely knew. A presence from another culture. A doorway into a new and feverish world.

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Sarah Hall was born in Cumbria. Twice nominated for the Man Booker Prize, she is the award-winning author of six novels and three short-story collections: The Beautiful Indifference, which won the Edge Hill and Portico prizes, Madame Zero, winner of the East Anglian Book Award, and Sudden Traveller, shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction. She is currently the only author to be four times shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award, which she won in 2013 with ‘Mrs Fox’ and in 2020 with ‘The Grotesques’.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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Welcome to the Shakespeare and Company podcast. Every week or so we release a new conversation with an internationally acclaimed author, recorded at our store in the heart of Paris. Recent guests have included Elif Shafak, Richard Powers, Leïla Slimani, Lauren Groff, Armando Iannucci and many more.

And for those of you who want to spend even more time here at Kilometre Zero, you can now subscribe for just three euros a month.

For that, you’ll get exclusive access to regular bonus episodes including…

• An initiation into the world of rare book collecting;
• The chance to expand your reading horizons as our passionate booksellers recommend their favourite titles;
• Handpicked classic interviews from our archive;
• And an insight into what makes your favourite writers tick as they answer searching questions from our Café’s Proust questionnaire.

All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events. We’re very grateful for your support.

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This week Aysegül Savaş joined Adam live in our writer’s studio to discuss White on White, her book about art and artists, parents and their children, beauty and class, as well as the quest for perfection and the compromises we make in pursuit of it. White on White was called "marvelous" by Lauren Groff and "gentle, mysterious and profound” by Marina Abramović.

Buy White on White here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9780593330517/white-on-white-a-novel

Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore

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A student moves to the city to research Gothic nudes, renting an apartment from a painter, Agnes, who lives in another town with her husband. One day, Agnes arrives in the city and settles into the upstairs studio.

In their meetings on the stairs, in the studio, at the corner café, the kitchen at dawn, Agnes tells stories of her youth, her family, her marriage, and ideas for her art - which is always just about to be created. As the months pass, it becomes clear that Agnes might not have a place to return to. The student is increasingly aware of Agnes's disintegration. Her stories are frenetic; her art scattered and unfinished, white paint on a white canvas.

What emerges is the menacing sense that every life is always at the edge of disaster, no matter its seeming stability. Alongside the research into human figures, the student is learning, from a cool distance, about the narrow divide between happiness and resentment, creativity and madness, contentment and chaos.

White on White is a sharp exploration of empathy and cruelty, and the stunning discovery of what it means to be truly vulnerable, and laid bare.

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Ayşegül Savaş is the author of Walking on the Ceiling. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, and elsewhere. She lives in Paris.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel Feeding Time here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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This week Philip Hoare discusses Albert & the Whale his dive into the mind of Albrecht Durer, one of the most well-known yet mysterious of artists. Mysterious because he lived at that fluid time, in the fifteenth century, where history and legend often blend into one. Mysterious because his works feel so replete with meaning and yet prove so hard to interpret. And mysterious because his skills were so advanced, his genius so profound, that his techniques are hard to replicate even more than five centuries later.

'This is a wonderful book. A lyrical journey into the natural and unnatural world' Patti Smith

Buy Albert & the Whale here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9780008323295/albert-and-the-whale

Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore

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Albrecht Durer changed the way we saw nature through art. From his prints in 1498 of the plague ridden Apocalypse - the first works mass produced by any artist - to his hyper-real images of animals and plants, his art was a revelation: it showed us who we are but it also foresaw our future. It is a vision that remains startlingly powerful and seductive, even now.

In Albert & the Whale, Philip Hoare sets out to discover why Durer's art endures. He encounters medieval alchemists and modernist poets, eccentric emperors and queer soul rebels, ambassadorial whales and enigmatic pop artists. He witnesses the miraculous birth of Durer's fantastical rhinoceros and his hermaphroditic hare, and he traces the fate of the star-crossed leviathan that the artist pursued. And as the author swims from Europe to America and beyond, these prophetic artists and downed angels provoke awkward questions. What is natural or unnatural? Is art a fatal contract? Or does it in fact have the power to save us?

With its wild and watery adventures, its witty accounts of amazing cultural lives and its delight in the fragile beauty of the natural world, Albert & the Whale offers glorious, inspiring insights into a great artist, and his unerring, sometimes disturbing gaze.

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Philip Hoare is the author of six works of non-fiction: Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant (1990) and Noel Coward: A Biography (1995), Wilde’s Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the First World War (1997), Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital (2000), and England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia (2005). Leviathan or, The Whale (2008), won the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. Most recently, The Sea Inside (2013) was published to great critical acclaim.

An experienced broadcaster, Hoare wrote and presented the BBC Arena film The Hunt for Moby-Dick, and directed three films for BBC’s Whale Night. He is Visiting Fellow at Southampton University, and Leverhulme Artist-in-residence at The Marine Institute, Plymouth University, which awarded him an honourary doctorate in 2011.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

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School of Instructions, the latest work by Ishion Hutchinson, draws from the time he spent in the archive of the Imperial War Museum, to foreground the experience—brutal, significant, but long overlooked—of West Indian volunteers in the First World War. This book length poem is a sensorial voyage into the convoys, garrisons and trenches of the Middle Eastern war theatre in all its monstrousness and disorientation, in which Ishion Hutchinson masterfully deploys his immense gift for spiriting vivid, textured, and living images from the page. The poem also juxtaposes the horror of war with the life of Godspeed, an ordinary—by which I mean mischievous and sweet-natured—boy growing up in rural Jamaica in the 1990s. And it is perhaps this interweaving of narratives, of epochs, of worlds, of the micro and the macro, that makes School of Instructions not just a significant work of poetry, but also an important act of historical empathy, reaching back more than a century to highlight how the ossified remains of empire continue to distort the lives of the people of once colonised lands. School of Instructions—which was shortlisted for the 2023 T. S. Eliot Prize—is a profound, affecting book, quite unlike any other work of poetry.

Buy School of Instructions: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/school-of-instructions

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Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of the poetry collections Far District, which won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and House of Lords and Commons, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature, the Whiting Award, and a Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize, among honors.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-england

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w

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This week’s guest is Michael Donkor whose new novel Grow Where They Fall is a meticulous and tender exploration of two formative moments in the life of one Kwame Akromah, twenty years apart. Kwame is Black, Gay, British of Ghanian descent, a dedicated teacher, a dependable friend—character traits and conditions of life that weave around each other and interact, with unpredictable results—whether for the ten-year old boy or the grown man—at times lifting Kwame up, at other times dragging him down. Grow Where They Fall manages to be as gentle as it is spirited, as moving as is fun to read, and Donkor handles the changing register of life, and of London, in these different decades, with skill and verve. It is a book not just about growing up, and perhaps growing old, but also, in a sense, about growing out — growing out of the roles handed down to us by our families, growing out of friendships, growing out of jobs, and growing out of our own fixed ideas about ourselves. It’s also a book which asks the essential human question: Is it ever really possible to know where we are going without first knowing where we have come from?

Buy Grow Where They Fall: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/grow-where-they-fall

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Michael Donkor was born in London in 1985. He was raised in a Ghanaian household where talking lots and reading lots were vigorously encouraged. Michael read English at Oxford where he developed a particular interest in the works of Woolf, Lessing and Achebe, and later undertook a Masters in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway. Michael worked in publishing for a number of years, but eventually decided to put his literary enthusiasms to other uses: in 2010, he retrained as an English teacher, teaching A-Level students, trying to develop a curious excitement about books and storytelling within his students. He now lives in Portugal, where he works as a bookseller. In 2014 Michael was selected by Writers Centre Norwich for their Inspires Mentoring Scheme, and worked with mentor Daniel Hahn. His first novel, HOLD, which explores Ghanaian heritage and questions surrounding sexuality, identity and sacrifice, was published by 4th Estate in 2018, and was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas and shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prizes. Michael was also selected by Scottish Poet Laureate Jackie Kay as one of the most important contemporary British BAME authors. He has written for the Guardian, the Telegraph, BBC Radio 3, the TLS and the Independent. 

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-england

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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